Here’s a possible consequence of climate change you might not have heard of yet: giant rockslides that could cause devastating tsunamis. Colin Ballantyne, a professor in the school of geography and geosciences at Scotland’s St. Andrews University, has studied the effects of retreating glaciers in the Scottish Highlands thousands of years ago, and has found that rocks that “spring back” after being freed from the massive weight of glacial ice on top of them tend to crack and weaken until reaching a critical point of collapse.
Image credit: Anynobody at Wikimedia Commons. (This image depicts the 1958 landslide at Lituya Bay, Alaska, which triggered a 1,720-foot-high megatsunami.)
